


But the road is wearier

by DrunkGerbil



Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Can be read as ot3 or gen, Epic Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Ice, M/M, Snow and Ice, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29431557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrunkGerbil/pseuds/DrunkGerbil
Summary: The world has ended in ice, but it still goes on. After the oceans froze over and human life only exists under domes, survival is a daily struggle. Three men have found each other to do what has to be done to keep the last vestiges of humanity alive. One delivery at a time.
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond & James May, Jeremy Clarkson/Richard Hammond/James May
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	But the road is wearier

It had been a gruelling few days on the lorry. One of the cylinders had gone, suddenly and with a heartstopping bang, and what followed was a desperate triage to keep them moving.   
James and Richard had worked through their respective offshifts, while Jeremy had stayed at the wheel for what amounted to two straight days of driving. 

The repairs had kept it running, but they were seriously crippled in their speed as well as sleeping like shit because of the wrong noise. That, especially, didn’t help them regain lost sleep. If it wasn’t the lorry breaking down on them, it would be the tiredness that would land them in serious trouble soon. 

It had it’s pros and cons, having ears and a subconsciousness so fine tuned to their lorry.

Now, more than ever, it was clear they needed to get it serviced, but for that they needed to finish their delivery run. They needed to be under a dome and behind barricades, in a heated hangar, with proper mechanics and manned machine gun turrets. 

Right now, they were somewhere on the Pacific, hobbling along on what a sprained ankle.

The lorry hadn’t stopped running in over a year at this point. That’s what it was made for, after all. Delivering trade goods and mail between the dome cities, never staying anywhere long enough to risk letting the engine cool.   
The thought of turning it off did not sit well with Richard. It never did. Understandable, he thought, considering what a dead engine meant on the ice. It was their only source of heat out here, where the great oceans of the world had frozen over.   
The low humming up in the cabin, the ear splitting hammering of gears and pistons down in the hold, the deafening roar of internal combustion in the engine room were all signs of life, of going on, of beating the odds. The noise meant fighting, and winning.

Silence, on the other hand, was death. Freezing or being devoured, it didn’t matter. Breaking through the ice. Those were things that happened with a silent engine. 

One of the sensors started beeping. It ripped Richard out of his barely caffeinated musings, and with a sigh he set his thermos down. Leaning over the dashboard, he switched the alarm off and studied the readings. 

“Motion sensors?” Jeremy asked from the driver seat, eyes glued to up ahead. All his attention was on the harsh terrain they were navigating. The seas still threw their might against the frozen sheets covering the world, raising splintered mountains of ice and cracking open deep, dark chasms big enough to swallow their lorry whole. The ice might have appeared frozen in time, but no journey could ever be taken on the same route twice.   
Richard always had to fight a shudder, thinking of the fathomless black depth that was the ocean they were crossing. The eternal dark. He had nightmares, sometimes, about being trapped under the ice. They left him gasping and shivering and so damn cold that nothing seemed to warm him up again. 

Richard’s fingers stabbed at the console a few times. 

“Movement on the starboard gangway,” he concluded from the readings. “The cameras are completely frozen over, as usual. I’ll check it out.” 

With a sigh that came from the bottom of his heart, he heaved himself up. 

“Take James,” Jeremy ordered.

“He only just went to bed,” Richard argued, slipping into his hazmat suit where it hung, haphazardly thrown over a clothes hanger on the back wall after its last stint in the sterilization chamber. 

“Hamster-“

“Come on, it’s probably just some crawlies. I’ll manage.”

James needed his rest. When doing 16 hour shifts, all the time one could spend resting was precious. Usually one of them drove, one was security, route planner and cook simultaneously, and one slept.   
Their shifts were offset by eight hours. When Richard got up, Jeremy had done eight hours of work already, and James got off because his sixteen were over. By the time Richard was half through his shift, James returned and Jeremy went to bed.   
This way, the cot was always still warm when you got to fall in. Frankly, it was quite nice. Until the smell got too much.

It also meant that all three of them were only ever awake together for very short stretches of time. On really long trips, across the Pacific or the Atlantic, it felt like they were playing an endless game of telephone, having conversations that lasted for days because they had to wait eight hours for an answer. Unless something went wrong, of course. Like a broken cylinder.   
It was hard work. None of them wanted to be woken in their off shift if it could be helped at all, and Richard knew how badly James had slept the last few days, felt it in his own bones. He’d manage. And anyway, James hated walking on the gangway while they were moving. It was too high up and shaky for his tastes. 

“Is your radio working?” Jeremy asked, still sounding displeased.

“Yes. Of course it is, you worrywart,” Richard sighed, longsuffering. 

“The only thing I’m worried about is my offshift falling flat because you got yourself dead,” Jeremy called out as Richard attached the oxygen unit to his suit and pulled his helmet on.

“Just focus on not driving us into a hole, and I’ll make sure nothing nicks the cargo.”

With that he closed the door to the cabin and marched down the long hallway to the decon lock. Once the readings told him he was completely sealed in, Richard hit the button starting the process of opening the door to the outside world. 

Armed with an icepick and his scanner, a brick shaped piece of outdated and very heavy technology, Richard stepped onto the gangway. The wind immediately gripped him, tried to throw him around, and he had to lock his safety rope to the handrail to remain standing.   
He was freezing cold in under ten seconds.   
White particles whipped against his visor, and the scanner told him it was ash rather than snow. Not that it mattered. Most of the things raining down from above were toxic these days. 

The creeping darkness of what must have been a sunset behind the clouds did not make Richard’s shaky trek along the gangway any easier. The cabin that held the tiny room they euphemistically called the bridge, as well as their little cot and washing cubicle, sat upon the engine room. Behind the cabin, it took only a few steps to the stairs that lead down to both sides of the cargo wagons, which dragged behind them like a ginormous rat tail.   
Both the engine room and the cargo hold could be reached without leaving the hermetically sealed insides, but sadly their unwelcome passengers could move quite quickly. By the time Richard would reach the sensor that went off, the crawlies would be gone. So he had to do it the old fashioned way and go looking on the outside. 

The first container, right behind the lorry itself, was their fuel tank. Richard checked the valves out of habit before shambling to the stairs. But before he could even make his way down the starboard side, the radio in his helmet crackled to life. 

“Hammond?” Jeremy’s voice sounded tinny, close and distant at the same time. Richard hit the button to transmit his answer. 

“Yeah. I’m making my way down to the gangway now.” 

“Be careful,” he was cautioned again in an unusual display of worry. It wasn’t often Jeremy showed that he cared so openly. The cylinder incident had rattled them all a bit.

“Aren’t I always?” Richard asked, hoping Jeremy could hear the grin in his voice. 

There was a wheeze, hissing through the radio connection. “Both of us know the answer to that,” came the gravelly reply. Then Richard was alone again. 

The metal grating that made up the floor was frozen over in some spots, so Richard had to scoot down the stairs on his bottom more than anything else. He was almost glad the cameras were goners at the moment.   
Even through the helmet he could hear the shrieking of the wind, though that couldn’t drown out the mechanical rattling of the tires turning, or the crunching of the ice and snow beneath them.   
When he finally reached the walkaround nestled beneath the overhang of containers, it was considerably gloomier already. The mist of ice crystals the massive tires kicked up made for foggy air, and Richard could barely see to the end of the first container that was holding their fuel supply. 

“Nothing crawls around on the petrol tank, at least,” he told the radio. 

“Just another thirty or so to check, then!” came Jeremy’s cheerful reply, and that was more like it, already. 

The going was rough. Richard had to remove icicles lest they fall on the head of the next poor soul who had to go outside. He got thrown off his feet several times when Jeremy drove over an especially big bump, and called up to the cabin to yell about all the bruises he’d have for it. 

“Have you _seen_ the terrain we’re driving over?! What am I supposed to do, fly? You want to come up here and do it better?” Jeremy yelled back.

“YES ACTUALLY! I’M FREEZING MY PLUMS OFF!”

“Well, you can’t. Tough luck,” was Jeremy’s only reply before he cut the line, and Richard went back to hobbling along and trying not to die, muttering a few choice words about his so called friends. 

Traversing between the containers was the truly scary part, though. Joints connected the wagons so the rat tail could move. That meant there were gaps between the grating plates. The distance could be called a big step, though it was almost saver to jump. The guide rope would remain fastened to the handrail on his side before Richard hopped over, from frozen metal to frozen metal. Then, if that had worked out and he didn’t end up dangling above the giant, thundering tires of the wagons, he had to cower down on the other side, lean over the gap, unfasten his guide rope, and refasten it on his side.   
All of this was done with almost exaggerated care, because the last thing Richard wanted was to fall to his death for a mistake caused by a tired brain. 

Fun all around. 

It would be easier with another person around to give him a hand, but Richard had insisted he’d manage, so he'd fucking manage. 

Just when he reached the twelfth wagon, the culprits showed themselves. Two of them, sitting on the frozen wall of the gangway. Primordial crabs the size of cats that had crawled up to the surface when the world had started to freeze. They, surprisingly, didn’t give a rat’s arse about the cold. Richard wasn’t entirely sure what they ate, either. Maybe each other. He wasn’t judging, though. There had been plenty of people doing the same in some parts of the world when it first had ended. When the dome cities had held against the ice, but the supply chain hadn’t. 

Everyone knew what had happened in Portland, after all. 

Sadly, the crawlies weren’t edible for humans, since they lived outside in the crap that was coming from above. They could have saved many a life otherwise.

It was fascinating how their claws could hold onto smooth metal caked in ice, though. James, in a fit of anger after he’d had to go and kill the fifth batch of them in one week, had set out to learn how they managed to get onto the evermoving lorry in the first place. It turned out they got catapulted into the air by the tires cracking the upper crust of ice, and then just stuck to the underside of the wagons. At some point, when recovered from the shock, they’d scramble up onto the containers and trigger the motion sensors.

Now, normally a handful of crawlies weren't much of a bother to humans, and unless there was a weak spot in a container’s outer hull, they didn't get into the holds either. But one infestation on the lorry had grown to the point where the horde had decided that Jeremy was the embodiment of a snack.   
It had been quite funny, Jeremy's squealing over the radio. Afterwards, he had shown off his battle wounds proudly, and they had laughed at the many tiny bites and cuts littering his legs where the crawlies had managed to cut through the hazmatsuit’s insulation. It hadn’t seemed so bad, since the seal to his upper body hadn’t been broken and his oxygen supply hadn’t been tainted. Up until the wounds had begun to ooze pus and a fever started to climb.   
James and Richard had gotten them to their destination barely in time to find a doctor for Jeremy. Now, the only reminders of that particular adventure were a sprinkle of ugly little scars and the shin guards James had installed in their hazmat suits. 

So yes. Killing crawlies was a necessity. 

Richard didn’t waste time on anything fancy and just cracked down the icepick on the crawly closest to him. The shells were quite hardy, but where the moving bits attached to the rest, the skin was leathery and weak. With a bit of practice they could be stuck dead in one go. Luckily - or sadly, considering - Richard had lots of practice. 

The pointy end of the icepick went in with a disgusting crack and squelch, and the crawly clattered onto the grating.   
Its companion wised up and quickly scuttled off, Richard hot on its claws. It took some skidding and slipping and banging about, and he had to unfasten the safety rope for more flexibility, but finally he had it cornered in a maintenance niche. 

“Oh you little bastard,” Richard huffed, finally a little warmed up by the exercise, and raised his arm to deliver the killing blow. “You shall regret the life choices that led you here.”

He struck, and grey ooze splashed onto the wall and, regrettably, his suit. That meant an extra thorough scrub under the uv light. Richard sighed. 

“Jeremy?” he asked after flicking the radio on. 

“Yeah?” came the immediate reply. Sitting on hot coals, apparently. Richard smiled, warmed by the thought.

“Crawlies, like I said. I got two of them,” he explained, shuffling along the walkway. “I’ll take a bit of a look around to make sure there aren’t any stragglers, but I think- AAAAAAAH!“ 

“Richard?!”

Richard couldn’t answer because the air was pressed from his lungs as he hit the grating. His head bounced on the metal, and even with the helmet on, he saw stars. He’d have thought that he’d slipped, if it wasn’t for something heavy crashing down on him. When his vision cleared, he stared up into bloodshot, foggy eyes above a truly horrifying maw.   
Richard’s hands automatically clawed into the ruddy, offwhite pelt above, keeping the snapping jaws just a few inches away from his throat. Otherwise those teeth would make short work of the suit and everything beneath. 

“ _Richard_!” Jeremy’s desperate plea penetrated the chaotic jumble, and Richard sucked in enough air to screech, “ _GHOUL_!”

“Fuck!” 

Only then did Richard notice that he wasn’t holding the icepick anymore. It had gone sailing in the tumble, which was bad, considering the monstrosity that he was now grappling with.   
_I should have woken James_ , Richard thought fleetingly, his arms shaking under the strain, and slowly, surely, bending to the weight on top of him, the grotesque visage coming ever closer to his visor. 

Ghouls were a form of great ape. Maybe a previously unknown kind, or maybe an apocalyptic mutation. No one had bothered to analyse them. All a traveller needed to know about ghouls was that their teeth could tear muscle from bone, their claws could rip through skin and leave infected gorges behind, and that they were eternally hungry. 

Richard was all too aware of that last point as saliva splattered onto his visor with every heaving, sniffing breath the creature took. He was on his back, winding and struggling. The ghoul met him with all it was worth, and that was, sadly, more than Richard could muster. More muscle and sinew, more hunter instincts. Bloodchilling growls roared out of a barrel chest, and a face uncannily close to a human’s grimaced in feral bloodlust. Claw like fingers dug into Richard’s shoulder and side, pinning him.

But this superior force was met by pure, animal fear. Brain flooded with adrenaline, Richard bucked wildly in a blind panic, movements jerky and unpredictable even to himself, uncaring of the material of the hazmat suit ripping, of bruises forming. Until he threw his head up. The helmet’s hard plastic and metal connected with a face’s fragile bones and cartilage. Blood joined the saliva on the now cracked visor. 

The ghoul reared back, roar turned to shriek, and Richard’s top half was suddenly free. 

He had a split second to use his limited freedom of movement, and reached out, groping for something, anything. The icepick was a goner, fallen off the gangway half a dozen miles behind them, but Richard’s fingers found the only other thing in the vicinity.

The scanner, usually clunky and uncomfortable, suddenly fit perfectly into his grasping hand. Richard swung backwards and up, with all the strength of desperation. It connected with a crack. 

The ghoul’s previous shriek increased in volume and intensity, surprise mixed with anger mixed with pain, ear splittingly loud. But Richard was free. 

With an ungraceful slip slide, he scrambled away, onto his hands and knees, and finally onto his feet. The wind was still pulling on him, but there was no time to attach the guide rope, no way he would let it slow him down when all he knew how to do was run.   
His heart pounded in time with his feet on the gangway. The heavy clangs behind him almost hurt in his chest, they were disrupting the rhythm so much, vibrating up through his legs. They were also coming closer. As was the labored grunting, breath pressed through a shattered nose, and the angry roaring. 

Richard sped up to a sprint, uncaring of the frozen patches. His senses zeroed in on the blood rushing in his ears, on his own panting loud in the helmet’s confines. Like tunnel vision, all he could see was the end of the wagon that was fast approaching, and with it the end of the walkway, and the gap. He couldn’t stop. Knew it in his bones, didn’t have enough space to slow down or think ahead. The only thing left for him to do was jump.

It happened so fast, and at the same time his adrenaline hyped senses made it feel like an eternity. He hung in the open air above the abyss without a guide rope or safety net, the moment frozen for a long, terrifying beat, and then he wasn’t. He landed on the other side, and for a split it seemed alright, that he wouldn’t have to break in his mad dash and could just run along. Could do it ten more times, and reach safety. 

Then there was that patch of ice. Of course he slipped. 

Something in his ankle gave way, a sharp pain shooting up his leg, and Richard smacked onto the grating. Winded, but his body still moving as if it hadn’t noticed the sudden stop at all, he was scrambling up again. The first step on his right foot almost sent him down again, and the ghoul was almost upon him again, had easily traversed the gap and was spraying spittle while roaring, now that its prey was wounded and slow. 

Richard gave all he could, hurtling along on his limping run, the pain curiously dulled by his body’s natural survival instincts. Through the fog he knew, though, that nothing he could do would win him this race. 

Then he saw the figure ahead. There was someone on the gangway, half obscured by the ice and ash spray. 

“GET DOWN!” a voice from his helmet speaker shouted, and Richard hit the grating before he’d even realized that he’d obeyed. 

It was James’ voice. He’d never not trusted James’ voice. His body knew that as well.

A bang rang out, and with a floor-shaking thump, the ghoul crashed to the floor beside him, half on top of him. Its wide open eyes were boring into Richard’s, unblinking and broken. 

Blood trickled from a hole in between them, so hot that the air around it steamed. 

They were caught in a staring contest that Richard just couldn’t break. His head was empty. Emptier, even, than the ghouls.

“Hammo,” a soft voice crackled through his helmet, startling him terribly, breaking the weird trance he’d been lost in. Suddenly he realized where he was lying, and threw himself away from the corpse, landing in a panting heap. Then his eyes fell on the man hurrying over to him, pressed as closely against the container wall as humanly possible. 

“James,” Richard breathed. 

“You should have woken me, you pikey,” came the gentle admonishment from the radio. Then there was a groan as James hauled him to his feet and started petting him down.

“James,” he repeated, louder, and crushed him in a hug that was tentatively reciprocated. 

“Are you hurt?”

Richard, quite honestly, had no idea. He was vaguely aware of his ankle smarting, but couldn’t tell how bad it was. So instead, he choked out, “I can’t believe I’m not dead,” while trying to relax his deathgrip on James’ arms. He didn’t quite manage. 

“It’s more surprising _I’m_ not dead,” James answered with a huff. “Do you have any idea how fast I ran here? In this weather?” 

“It must have been quite scary,” Richard whispered. He knew James, knew what the altitude and the speed of the lorry did to him. James only shook his head. 

“Not as scary as you, out here, alone with a ghoul.”

He bumped his helmet against Richard’s as he said that. It made a weird creaking sound. James jumped back, out of the embrace, hand going up to what Richard remembered must be a crack in his visor. 

“Is that - is that a _tooth_ sticking in the glass?” James asked, alarmed. “Is your seal broken?!”

“Huh… the air does taste a little funny,” Richard noted faintly, feeling a bit distant from himself, like he was only watching the proceedings. James said, “Oh cock,” and hauled him along back to the cabin.

~

Jeremy had slowed them down to a crawl and thrown the autopilot on, which wasn’t any good on bad terrain, but could manage for a short while on its own without killing them. That gave him enough time to help James guide a shocked and limping Hammond into the warmth of the cabin, and also yell his head off. 

“Only you, Hammond. Only you would let a six foot tall and 30 stone heavy ape sneak up on you!”

“It’s white! Everything out there is white! The only things that aren’t are the bloody crawlies.” 

Driving along with the sounds of Richard’s struggle on the speakers while being unable to move from his post had left Jeremy almost as shaky as Richard himself. Luckily he’d given in to the nagging voice of worry and woken James even before Richard had found the crawlies, let alone the ghoul. James had already been halfway in his own hazmat suit, grumbling and complaining, when the call had come.

“It’s _never_ just crawlies, Hammond!” Jeremy continued yelling.

“I can’t believe we are getting this lecture from the man who regularly tells us ‘Crossing the Pacific in a lorry? How hard can it be?’”

“What do you mean, we? Leave me out of this,” James muttered, flopping into the driver seat and taking over.

“And don’t you bloody forget it!” Jeremy growled as he bandaged Richard’s ankle. 

In the following days, Richard developed a terrible cough from having breathed in the ash rain polluted air, but thankfully, and due to Jeremy’s endless motherhenning, it didn’t turn into pneumonia.   
The sprained ankle disqualified him from driving duty for almost a week, much to his companions’ annoyance. The bruises, on the other hand, looked a lot worse than they actually were, and soon faded first to green, than to yellow, and then to nothing. 

They would reach the coast soon, and with it the dome city of Lost Angels. There, the lorry could finally get a well deserved servicing, and James could annoy the Americans by hanging over their shoulders and double checking their work. But most importantly, they would finally get to sleep in a real bed.


End file.
